1

Consulting Service

2019CASE STUDY

2

Company Background:

The Embassy of Japan in Ottawa and its consulates in Canada offer numerous programs to

provide an immersive feel into Japanese culture. Aside from standard embassy services, their

visitors have access to a lending library, an auditorium, school visit programs, a teaching

program (JET), as well as access to any general information regarding Japanese related programs.

A large part of the duties of the Embassy of Japan and its consulates is to create awareness of what Japan has to offer through social media and local

events that help foster a desire to learn about Japanese culture and travel to Japan.

3

Their Challenges:

Compared to other Embassies in Ottawa and Canada, the EoJ had low

follower & engagement rates across their approved social networks.

The EoJ just didn’t have the training, ability or understanding to properly

execute organic and/or paid social media campaigns. They needed a blueprint that could be re-delivered to their employees & consulats when needed.

The EoJ didn’t have a clear definition of who their audience was, their audiences online behaviours or what channels their audience engaged with.

The EoJ did not know how to read or understand the analytics in their various social platforms in order to fulfill its day to day social requirements

Tokyo and the Japanese Ambassador demanded this be addressed before the end of their fiscal year. We had only 6 weeks to execute.

4

Budget

EoJ Budget for 2019: 2.5 Million Yen. Approx 30K including all taxes.

The Embassy of Japan had a

total budget of 3 million Yen which translates to roughly 30,000 CAD after taxes.

The table displays the separate costs of each individual service

that was provided to the EoJ.

5

Our Solution:

Full persona development delivered and explained via recorded webinar series

Full review of the client’s current Social Media Strategy

A series of 4 pre-recorded webinars (1 hour each) to teach and explain the EoJ’s social media marketing strategy

Webinar #1 Social Media Competitor Review

Webinar #2 Personas and Customer Journey Maps

Webinar #3 Social Media Best Practices

Webinar #4 Campaign & Calendar Planning

Professionally shot on location Video for the Embassy of Japan

Redevelop the Embassy of Japan (EoJ) Organic SM Strategy

Bonus Facebook live tutorial and guide

Paid SM Ad strategy for the Embassy of Japan

6

Objectives

1. Competitor Review:

Review of activities performed by competitors.

Understanding competitor goals, objectives, and audiences and how they

can be applied to the Embassy of Japan as well as the Consulates.

Review what other competitors are doing on social media. What is working

and what is not.

Determine any gaps in the industry and gain insight on what unique content

should be focused on by the Embassy of Japan and it’s consulates.

Review the importance of audience definition.

7

Competitive Analysis

1. Competitor Review:

How often do they post?

What kind of content are they posting?

What degree of overlap is there between the services they provide and the services the EoJ provides?

How engaged is their audience?

What value can their followers get out of your content?

What kind of optimization tactics are they using that can be co-opted for your own social strategy?

What are they doing that should be avoided?

8

1. Competitor Review:

Our FocusSince we know the Embassies & Consulates will have limited budget for paid advertising to promote

their social media, we assumed the majority of EoJ’s audience will be finding them via search engines. Therefore, we decided to start the journey at the Google search box.

This is why we built a set of keywords for each audience segment so we could use these as our primary tools to find EoJ’s potential competitors.

We then used a combination of these search results and our own reasoning to decide upon a list of competitors to analyze.

9

1. Competitor Review:

Keywords What keywords are these segments searching for?

Primary Competitors in each segment:

For the Embassy of Japan we started by doing research into

the potential audiences and determined 3 primary audience segments to focus on:

Segment 1: People aged 13-19 interested in learning about

culture and/or attending cultural events.

Segment 2: People aged 20-29 who are interested in working abroad through programs like the JET.

Segment 3: People aged 30+ who are interested in travel as tourists.

2. Persona Development:

What Are Personas? Objectives:

Personas are designed to give insight to the

type of people EoJ will be reaching. They provide an idea of the types of messages to send, and also the best media to capture

their attention. These are not necessarily based on real people.

Review of activities performed by competitors.

Learn how to use the information we gathered in webinar #1 to develop specific, in-depth, personas relevant to EoJ’s ideal audience.

Breakdown of potential sources to pull from for research while developing personas.

How to use personas to develop customer journey maps.

Developing key messaging for each persona.

10

Development & Research

2. Persona Development:

1. Viewed current social media strategy, objectives, and goals.

2. Researched relevant competitors with similar goals and target audiences.

3. Used a variety of research sources to develop characters who they would like to reach.

4. Used reasoning to establish the types of values these individuals would have as well as their

goals and challenges.

5. Created a backstory to add life to the personas.

6. Used reasoning to determine the kind of tools they would use and what media they would engage with.

11

2. Persona Development:

Customer Journey Map

Once we developed the

personas for EoJ, it was time to think about how they would like each character to discover

and interact with their brand.

There’s a few different ways to

organize a customer journey map, but for EoJ we developed this simple chart to help with

the exercise.

12

2. Persona Development:

Ethan Huggins

Persona

Marketing Message:

“Learn about Japanese culture and meet new people in

Ottawa”

Focus Keywords:

Japanese culture, anime fans Ottawa, learn Japanese, Japanese

cultural events

13

2. Persona Development:

Ethan Huggins

Persona

More info:

14

2. Persona Development:

Ethan Huggins

Journey Map:

15

2. Persona Development:

Kayla Morgan

Persona

Marketing Message:

“Broaden your horizons by teaching abroad. No experience

necessary.”

Focus Keywords:

Travel abroad cheap, work and travel, teach in Japan, teach ESL

in Japan, get paid to travel

16

2. Persona Development:

Kayla Morgan

Persona

More info:

17

2. Persona Development:

Kayla Morgan

Journey Map:

18

2. Persona Development:

Persona

Marketing Message:

“Immerse yourself in the rich culture and history of

Japan.”

Focus Keywords:

Best vacation tips, must-see travel destinations, Japan travel

itinerary, Japan economy tours, Canadian flights to Japan

James Young

19

2. Persona Development:

Persona

More info:

James Young

20

2. Persona Development:

Journey Map:

James YoungJames Young

21

How Did We Help?

3. Social Media Best Practices:

Given that social media changes over time, we helped EoJ understand the fundamentals of Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube, and how they can use these 3 platforms to their success.

We gave in-depth advice regarding how EoJ should post (amount of text, hashtags, visual appeal, etc). We did this by analysing their previous social posts to explain the pros and cons of a few examples.

22

Campaign Focus

4. Campaign and Calendar Planning:

Our focus with EoJ’s social media campaign goals

was to raise awareness among young people about the programs the Government of Japan has in place to promote cultural exchanges (Kakehashi,

MEXT Scholarship, JET Programme).

Ultimately, this was done to raise the profile of

these programs and increase the number of applicants (when applicable). JET stands for Japanese Exchange and

Teaching

23

Campaign Goals

4. Campaign and Calendar Planning:

Social Networking:

Use Facebook and Twitter to promote the JET Programme and reach potential applicants. Tokyo has not given it’s Embassies permission to use Instagram.

Business:

Increase the number of applicants to the JET Programme by promoting it on social media and directing

potential applicants to the application process and other valuable resources that could be of use.

SMART Objectives:

Reach 4,000 fans on Facebook by May 31st.Reach 6,950 followers on Twitter by May

31st.

Receive a total of 100 comments on Facebook posts related to the recommended campaign during the

month of May. Our campaign content was also retweeted 100 times during the month of May.

24

Campaign Questions

4. Campaign and Calendar Planning:

These questions are essential for

launching, maintaining, monitoring, and consistently improving any social media campaign. We made sure the EoJ had a

very specific and detailed roadmap ahead as it would lead to better results.

Why did we do this?

Which audience persona are we targeting and why?

What content and content types are we creating and what is the key messaging?

In which channels are we distributing the content and

why?

What stages of the customer journey does each piece of content represent?

What is the call-to-action to improve engagement?

What are the key performance indicators?

25

Example:

4. Campaign and Calendar Planning:26

Campaign Calendar

4. Campaign and Calendar Planning:

When it came time for EoJ to actually

make posts on their social media, we helped guide them to write content that would engage the target

personas. Our general suggestions were to make sure every post had some form

of rich media (poll, link, event, etc) and always used the social media best practices to determine optimal days

and timing for posts.

27

What Else Did We Do?

4. Campaign and Calendar Planning:

Community Management:

Measuring Metrics:

Tips for Paid Social:

We believe that it’s essential to ensure constant

monitoring of social media for comments, messages, hashtags and replies to your page as a swift response from EoJ would only increase

brand awareness and user engagement.

Constantly keeping track of metrics can be tedious when done manually, so we

suggested tools such as HootSuite and Agorapulse to streamline the process. We suggested that EoJ keep track of important engagement metrics of all social posts once per week, and check to see if the engagement (likes / comments / shares)

and followers were on track to meet their goals. Lastly, it was crucial to assess which parts of the strategy weren’t as effective so they could re-adjust accordingly.

Incorporation of the audience personas was essential for paid social so EoJ could

target their ideal consumers and get the biggest bang for their buck. We gave advice on how to properly execute A/B testing as Facebook has various Ad types, placements, and targeting options. To begin, we recommended that the EoJ start

with boosted posts before moving on to larger Ad campaigns.

28

5. Social Media Ad Targeting / SNS

Social media Ad targeting can be quite

effective, but also very expensive if not properly executed.

To ensure the best outcome for the EoJ, we made sure the following items were in place...

A SMART objective

Up-to-date personas

Relevant customer journey map

A campaign plan and calendar

A schedule for daily and weekly monitoring

A well defined Ad campaign budget

Review of advertising policies for social media platforms

Checklist:

29

Ad Targeting based on Personas:

5. SNS Ad Targeting:

JamesKylaEthan

Given that Facebook Ads have a variety of specific options to narrow down a target audience,

we chose the most relevant Ad categories with respect to each persona. This is because proper targeting is a necessity for any successful Ad campaign, especially on a social platform such as Facebook which has a diverse popularity of roughly 1.6 billion daily users.

30

We Also Created A Video!

We hired a professional video production agency who sent a crew into the EoJ to create a short 1 minute HD-

Quality video to showcase what the EoJ is about, it’s community, their programs etc. This video was created to give their social audience a quick snap shot into what the EoJ has to offer. Cost to create video was $3500. WSI Charged the EoJ $6000.

It was uploaded as a banner video on their Facebook, and was also posted to their Twitter account.

31

What Was The Total Impact?

Social Media Growth

Facebook

:

Twitter:

The Video has received over 3,200 views

on just their Twitter account alone.

Their Facebook following

surpassed the desired goal of 4,000.

The EoJ’s Twitter

following grew beyond the goal of 6,950.

32

Client Testimonial:

It is the Embassy’s explicit policy not to leave or endorse a contractor via reviews, but the Marketing Director did have this to say which he published through his private channel.

Testimonial:

33